Hello Again,

For those of you checking, I have not posted in quite some time. This is due to a couple of factors including a new position with my company, Motorola and a 2 week vacation with the family in Spain and Portugal. The former has caused my life to be a whole lot busier and the latter, well, other than an occasional look at my PDA, I literally disconnected from the world. No TV, no newspapers, no cellphones and the result was 2 weeks of absolute relaxation. At least as relaxing as traveling with two young boys can be anyway!

We flew down to Malaga and from there drove to a town called Benahavis along the Costa del Sol. My boss just purchased a beautiful apartment in a lovely complex that had several pools, a sauna/steam room and exercise machines and beautiful golf courses for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing. It was awesome and in a great area only minutes from Marbella and some great coastline. He rents it out via a management service by the week and I highly recommend it. I've included the website where my links are should anyone be interested.

After the week in Spain, we drove to the Algarve Coast of Portugal and stayed a week in Albufiera. Algarve is the Southern Region of Portugal on the Atlantic. I was really impressed with Portugal. The coast is stunning and very different from Spain despite only being a few hours away from where we were.

We took the time to visit most of the Western coast and went all the way to Sagres which is on the tip of the Southwestern Coast, It is known for its sunsets and as you can see, we were not disappointed! The kids were fascinated by the Sun "going to sleep".

We also took a boat ride on the Leaozinho which enabled us to see the coast from the ocean and its many caves and formations. This also allowed us to spot a couple of "hidden" beaches one of which we fell in love with called Marinha Beach. The only inconvenience was having to climb up and down a lot of stairs and Samuel, our youngest has a couple of meltdowns in the face of having to climb the stairs after a day at the beach. We managed by having him count the steps (98 to be exact)!

The people of Portugal were very kind and the food was excellent with naturally lots of fish and mostly grilled. We enjoyed the whole experience so much, we would gladly go back despite our general preference to not revisit the same place twice.